Garlic scapes are the flowers which are produced by hardneck garlic in the summer. Since garlic mainly reproduces asexually, the flowers almost never produce true garlic seed. Instead they are cut off from the plant so that it can concentrate its energies on producing a large bulb.
The scapes are great, but rarely used in the kitchen. They have a mild garlic flavor and you can fry or grill them like asparagus. I have been using them to make a garlic scape pesto, which I then freeze.
We planted 70 cloves of hardneck garlic this year, so we've had a lot of scapes. Too bad that Polly's pregnancy makes garlic smell awful! We're going to have to find some way of getting rid of a lot of garlic this year...
5 comments:
um, can you mail them to me????
The scapes look really beautiful. Give them to Greg. He'll do something cool with them. You can probably give your extra garlic to a food pantry, unless of course Eve wants it all!
nice pictures mister blogosphere :)
you could seed save and give them to your neighbors :) and me too!
I love garlic scapes so very much! We got them in our CSA last year, and now I like to use them in cooking.
I can try to mail some out. We shall see. I'm sure I will take some more pictures when we harvest.
I'm not sure if we will be able to save some for replanting next year. Some of the plants got garlic rust this year, which is a fungus disease that shouldn't effect the cloves, but will make it so we shouldn't replant any that show signs of the infection
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